The following essay was delivered at the American Academy of Religion Conference in Washington DC, November 2006.

In it, I make a case for teaching difficult figures or topics, such as Sren Kierkegaards work, through the teaching of academic writingand vice-versa. While this essay was not part of my application material for the Excellence in Teaching Writing Award, I include it here as an articulation of the ways in which I have found writing instruction and to be an invaluable dimension of more disciplinespecific teaching and learning.

Teaching Writing through Kierkegaard (and vice-versa) Jason A. Mahn Duke University Writing Program Unlike most of the others on this panel, I was not asked to talk about teaching Kierkegaard because I have done so over a long career, or because my own work with Kierkegaard is well known. I am hereI thinkbecause, despite my share of pedagogical failures, I have become reflective about teaching Kierkegaard by having done so in a unique setting, namely, through the Duke University Writing Program, where I teach Academic Writing seminars to first-year undergraduates. Academic Writing (WR 20) is the only course required of all Duke students. Unlike upper-level writing in the disciplines courses that are housed in various departments, Dukes introduction to academic writing does not use writing to help students learn about a discipline or figure, but rather uses the discipline or figure to teach academic writing. So whereas UWP course topics range from conservation biology to queer studies, the primary goal of each is to get students to become persuasive and nuanced writers by embedding them in the conventions and practices of academic scholarship, including drafting, peer-consultation, re-thinking, and rewriting. This is our goal even when student knowledge of coral reefs or of heteronormativity or of Sren Kierkegaard takes back seat to the topic of academic writing. It would seem that WR 20s focus away from figures and topics and toward practices and conventions would provide a poor forum for helping students patiently sift through Kierkegaards convoluted authorship. This would seem especially true for the course I taught last semester (Spring 2006): Writing with Kierkegaard through Contemporary Conundrums. As the title indicates, I didnt primarily ask my students to learn about Kierkegaard or even to write about him, but rather to employ Kierkegaards workto write with himin the effort to think through other contemporary social and cultural predicaments. Surely this effort doubly-displaces Kierkegaards work and leads to misunderstandings and misappropriations. And admittedly, it often did. I want to make the case, however, that the effort to use Kierkegaard in order to grapple with contemporary issues and in the effort to teach writing might lead students to engage Kierkegaards writing better than would a more direct approach. If I were to state my claim in the too-strong terms of Johannes de Silentio, I would say that, having resigned myself to give up teaching Kierkegaard for the task of teaching writing, I have found that sacrifice to be returned perhaps more abundantly than if it were never made. Certainly not miraculously, but at least unexpectedly, teaching writing through Kierkegaard enables undergraduate students also to come to terms with Kierkegaard in demonstrable and striking ways. Before turning to two student projects that help me make this case, allow me to list well-known aspects of Kierkegaards work that suggest why writing with him might be an appropriate way to study him. First, the indirection of this approach parallels the indirection of Kierkegaards authorship. Kierkegaard was concerned that the instructor of any essential trutha truth which one might livenot get in the way of its reception and exhibition. Often in my WR 20 courses, my teaching persona is as an advanced co-writer and a careful respondent of student texts, rather than as a Kierkegaard expert. This classroom role allows me to redirect many questions about what Kierkegaard means back onto the student-writers use of him. Of course, I also highlight reoccurring Kierkegaardian themes and teach his biography and historical context, but almost

always as tools that students can use in their appropriation of his texts. In this way I join Kierkegaard in a kind of indirect communicationeven if my methods arise from pedagogical rather than theological or existential concerns. Second, the opportunity to guide students in their writing with Kierkegaard helpfully presents Kierkegaard first and foremost as a writer. There are, of course, a number of debates concerning whether Kierkegaard is primarily a proto-existentialist, a philosopher, a theologian, a religious thinker, a religious poet, a deconstructionist, and so forth. But it seems to me that the least ideological and most materially constitutive description of Kierkegaard is as a writerone whose theology, philosophy, or other ideas are inextricable from the rhetorical shape of the written page. My students have trouble with this. They want me and others readers of their work to avoid looking too closely at what is writtento instead get the main idea or point out of it just as they want to know what Kierkegaard really thinks after reading, for example, an unusual sermon from a Jutland Pastor who is writing to a moral volitionist who is writing to an aesthetic lyricist. Asking such students to read in order to write invites them to treat texts as textsas artifacts whose opaque tropes, figures, and stories generate interpretation rather than obscure it. Third, teaching the art of writing by employing a body of work helps to dramatize Kierkegaards distinction between objective knowledge (knowledge that can be absorbed through disinterested inculcation) and subjective thinking (the appropriation, or redoubling, of a human capability through commitment and practice). Such a distinction corresponds to that of Paulo Freire between the banking system of education, where the professor deposits and the student retains a sum of knowledge, and education as consciousness raisingor what Kierkegaard simply calls awakening. I take it that for Kierkegaard this division is one of precedence and comprehensiveness rather than of mutual exclusion; while subjective awakening requires objective knowledge, disinterested inculcation gets along well without subjective appropriation and, in fact, can do better without it. The priority of subjective employment over objective knowledge materializes in my academic writing class already in the course description. Here, I begin by describing the goals and practices of academic writing, proceed to explain how the most interesting contemporary conundrums invite not knock-down solutions but to be thought through by employing new perspectives and careful academic prose. It is only then that I introduce Kierkegaards writings as a fruitful means toward this end. At the end of the first class session, after we read through the syllabus, one student bravely asked: So, what is this course about? Her question reveals the prevalence of the assumption that objective knowledge is more determinative for education than are the practices of understanding and appropriation. My protracted responsethat the course is about any number of contemporary issues that you chose to address, that its objective is to write more persuasively, and that the primary tools for addressing issues and practicing writing are the writings of Sren Kierkegaardtestifies to both the need and the difficulty of positioning objective knowledge within the more expansive aims of subjective thinking. Finally, and most comprehensively, is the simple distinction Kierkegaard makes between what is said and how it is said. This distinction encompasses many aspects of a course on teaching writing through Kierkegaard, but applies most directly to the student authorship of and responses to written texts. As I also mention in the course description, in almost every session of WR 20 students bring their own written projects to class to be read and commented on by their peers and professor. Many of these student texts serve as windows into Kierkegaards texts, and we end up discussing the Kierkegaardian passages and conceptual moves that the student has employed in his or her project. But these textual windows are not transparent. Far from introducing Kierkegaards subject matter as efficiently as possible (perhaps as typical seminar starters are meant to do), students compose projects that employ Kierkegaardian moves for new purposes, making all routes back to Kierkegaard rather circuitous. Our comments, too, concern how the

student author is making use of Kierkegaards writings: where and why she is coming to terms with Kierkegaard, forwarding him, countering him, or taking his approach. 1 We also question when and how the writer is incorporating the actual words of Kierkegaard, for what purposes according to her own project. All this suggests that the academic writing course always already grapples with what Kierkegaard thinks (or better, writes) in terms of how the student is rethinking and re-writing his work. While this method risks reducing Kierkegaards writings to tools that can be extracted from their context and then readily employed (or, worse, beaten into conceptual swords that can be wielded to cut apart other problems and texts), I actually think those projects that creatively employ Kierkegaard within a very different project attend most closely to the what and the how of Kierkegaards work. In other words, in knowing what to do with an idea, students circuitously but attentively grapple with the original attitude, mood and implications of Kierkegaards text; they better grasp the attendant context of his work; and they strive to understand not only what Kierkegaard means, but also how he means it and why it is important. In order to support these claims, I want to draw your attention to the use of Kierkegaard in two first-year student texts. I especially want to point to those places where, although the students are writing about a Hollywood film and a contemporary debate about religion and science, they demonstrate remarkable engagement with the rhetorical force of Kierkegaards texts. The first project was written by Tommy Harward2 in response to the assignment that I have included on page 3 of the handout. Having worked through selections of Either/Or (from the Hong anthology) and then having watched the film American Beauty, I asked students to forward words and ideas from Either/Or to make an interesting claim about the films portrayal of the ethical and aesthetic life-views. Like most of the student writing, Harwards project (reproduced on pages 4 and 5) connects the midlife crisis of the films protagonist, named Lester, with the adoption of Kierkegaards aesthetic lifestyle, and connects the morality of Colonel Frank Fitts, Lesters foil, with Judge Williams ethics. More important than this comparison are the grounds Harward gives for making it. On the bottom of his first page, the author claims: The esthetic lifestyle according to A is far more than a simple recognition and appreciation of beauty. It requires a very specific methodology that advocates recollection as the requirement for true beauty: When an individual has perfected himself [] in the art of recollecting in this way, he is then able to play shuttlecock with all existence (57). Indeed, all of Lesters esthetic indulgences come forward as recollections. He partakes of the typical nostalgias of the American mythology. He buys himself a muscle car, works at a burger joint, plays old Dylan records, and is always with a cold beer in hand. These eccentricities are simply recollections of what American culture holds to be beautiful. Theyre universal goods, taking on an almost divine personality. The quick judgment is that Lester, as seen through As method, has achieved a truly beautiful life in a uniquely American style. In order to write this text, Harward has grappled with a difficult and pivotal component of Kierkegaards aesthete, namely, the idea that controlled recollection issues in ironic detachment from all plans and commitments. He has also read American Beauty as playing upon a similar,
1

These moves are described in detail by Joseph Harris in Rewriting: How to do Things with Texts (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2006), a book which students in my WR 20 courses read, and the moves of which they explicitly practice. 2 Both Tommy Harward and Madeline McKeever, now sophomores at Duke University, gave me permission to use their writings and names in this presentation. I thank them for this, and for exhibiting such noteworthy moves in their work for WR20.

but uniquely American, nostalgia for the lost Golden Age. His text ascertains a distinctive dimension of Kierkegaard aesthetic lifestyle by reading American popular culture in light of it. On the second page of his project, Harward pushes harder against Kierkegaards text when he aligns the discipline of Colonel Fitts with the self possession of Kierkegaards Judge William. According to Harward, both characters have won for themselves the quality of being in charge, of knowing what the situation is at all times. Furthermore, it is, in a certain sense absolute, for it is between choosing and not choosing (76). In the light of the absolute, the ethical becomes a simple issue of choice, with ultimate faith that everything can be resolved with sheer will. Judge William urges A to use his will for personal reform. Likewise, Col. Fitts rather bluntly reprimands his son, Ricky, for his weakness. Rickys problems all arise from his lack of willpower. If he, like the Colonel, could fully use his strength of will, he could overcome all temptation from drugs and pleasure to become an upright, ethical man. Sounds good, right? This passage sets up Harwards final account of how such self-reliance on individual volition easily reverses itself into fits of passion, illustrated by the way the Colonels ethical house of cards collapses in an act of murder at the end of the film. Some Kierkegaardians who want to sanction Judge William as representative of Kierkegaards ethics will claim that Harward tooclosely connects the self-reflective Judge and the repressed Colonel, that Harward is compelled to caricature the ethical lifeview when he takes it out of context in order to interpret a hypocritical and reproachful figure. Certainly the project risks this. But by having to read Fitts in light of William (and probably vice-versa), Harward notices a weak spot in moral rhetoric that would otherwise be overlookedespecially by those imbued in a mythology of self-reliance and freedom, which might also be uniquely American. I might add that he calls into question the very characteristics of Judge Williams ethics that leading Kierkegaardians also critique, and does so convincingly. Harwards final suggestion that Either/Or amounts to a neither/nor when ethics and aesthetic are left to themselves even anticipates the third perspective of the Jutland Pastors sermon, which Harward had not yet read at the time of this project. In her final project for the course, Maddie McKeever employed the conceptual terrain and rhetorical movements of Johannes de Silentios Fear and Trembling to propose unique ways of understanding the relationship between religion and science. Entitled Inextricably Distinct: The Symbiosis of Science and Religion, McKeevers project works to theorize the relation between religion and science in a way that is more complex and paradoxical than either integration or independence, two categories that McKeever borrows from the work of Ian Barbour. She first aligns science, with its repeatable observations and general laws, with de Silentios depiction of universal ethics, and aligns religion, which varies from person to person and from moment to moment (8), with de Silentios description of Abrahams faith. Her first suggestion is that Kierkegaards text helps to distinguish the unique and irreconcilable functions of science and religion (8). So far, the connection McKeever makes merely allows her to side with Barbours independence model over his integration model. I dont want to slight this correlationit exemplifies a faithful reading of Fear and Trembling and the ability to find correlates within a different rhetorical context. But she does not yet demonstrate more than a grasp on conceptual distinctions. Happily, this preliminary move serves only to get McKeevers project off the ground. She notes that the division between de Silentios ethics and faith is hermeneutical rather than phenomenological, and that science and religion today likewise offer differing interpretations for the same circumstance (9). McKeever then admits that while designating science and religion as universal and particular implied that each derives its value from a

unique purpose, [this division] does not adequately explain how their integration diminishes that value rather than creating an aggregate of equal or greater significance (9). In a self-critical move, McKeever here questions why the separation between two interpretive schemes does not invite synthesisas two perspectives are ostensibly better than one. To respond, McKeever turns to Kierkegaards text to question why Abrahams faith actively resisted universal comprehension (10). According to her reading of de Silentio: Abraham could not disclose his duty to anyone else because the absurdity of his faith excluded it from universal understanding. Yet it is obvious that de Silentio does not consider this lack of universal understanding a shortcoming as he heralds Abrahams embodiment of faith: Abraham, great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self. De Silentios praise reveals that the particular nature of religion allows for an acceptance of paradox and an acknowledgment that human comprehension need not be universal to be significant. I find this passageand its use of de Silentios passageremarkable. McKeever suggests that religious knowledge is qualitatively distinct from universal knowledge, that its particularity cannot be considered part of more comprehensive whole, and that even the paradoxical praise of de Silentio exemplifies a form of knowing, one that is closer to wisdom, hope and love than it is to universal truth. The last two pages of McKeevers project utilize de Silentios language of suspension and temptation to suggest that the relation between science and religion, like that between universal ethics and faith, is best characterized by active reciprocal resistance, allowing for conflict and dialogue between them to persist, [which] actually makes both disciplines more valuable than either would be in isolation (11). What makes faith remarkable, McKeever suggests, is not only the particular characteristics of religious knowledge, but the way this particular knowledge actively resist[s] resorting to the universal as an easy escape (11). Science and religionlike faith and ethicsare not insular, self-justifying enterprises, but ones which gain their strength by resisting easy refuge in the other. McKeever ends with a cultural critique. The popular movement to amalgamate science and religion into new age metaphysics or spirituality, as represented by the film What the Bleep Do We Know?, takes advantage of modern societys desire for mediation and essentially tells its viewers what they want to hearthat conflict does have a clean, clear cut resolution. Ironically, while challenging its viewers to become more intellectually active, the movie encourages the view of science and religion that is actually less difficult to accept. The more difficult path, according to McKeevers project, is neither integration nor isolation but a kind of independence that depends on the temptation of alternative frameworks. I would expect most first-year Duke students to be able to understand Kierkegaards distinctions between ethics and religiousness, the universal and the particular, the knight of resignation and the knight of faith. McKeever has done much more. In needing to think through the relationship between religion and science in a way that complicates common distinctions between independence and integration, McKeever reads Kierkegaards texts not simply for conceptual distinctions or for Kierkegaards alleged preference for faith over ethics. She rather unearths the mood of de Silentios text, tracing its confrontation with the tendency of cultured Christianity to justify faith by making it universally understandable and ethically innocuous. In the end, she forwards not a concept or a position but a resistance to the temptation for easy answers and the desirewith Kierkegaardnot to make religion less difficult than it is.

While I cannot claim that teaching writing through Kierkegaard is the only way student might be led into the thick rhetorical complexities of Kierkegaards writings, I do think that writing with Kierkegaard is for students an interesting, difficult, and rewarding venture.